“T
HESE ARE THE TIMES that try men’s souls,” wrote the American patriot Thomas Paine in the dark December of 1776 when it was uncertain whether
the American Revolution would succeed. In J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings, Frodo expresses the same feeling:
Frodo: I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.
Gandalf: So do all that come to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.
Each generation has to face the challenge of living in
an imperfect world not of their making, and to face their fears about the future that will be left to their children. Yet in many ways, the near-future looms significantly in the lives of both students and teachers. We are confronted daily with stories about economic turmoil and the potential for widespread economic chaos, about the possibilities of pandemic disease, about increasingly unpredictable and even catastrophic weather, about species and habitat loss and extinctions. Of course, none of this is certain: we can’t know the future. But from one grim prognosis to another, the future appears to be risky, and we as educators need to be able to consider how we talk with our students about the world that they will inhabit.
The past, present and the future
For most of humankind’s existence, people have lived in a technologically simpler world governed by traditional values and ways of living— a world in which concepts of economic growth, of technological progress, and of a future radically different from the present were likely not known or much worried about. Whereas we perceive change to be a constant, one can imagine that for most of human history, relative stasis was the norm in a world governed by the rhythms of the earth and the cycles of life, one season following the next, one birth following one death, proceeding across the generations. Indeed, in his recent CBC Massey Lecture, anthropologist Wade Davis noted that during the Paleolithic period, humans’ criteria of beauty seemed to be stable for 25,000 years. Most of us are aware of the future in ways and to a
degree that might have been unimaginable in earlier times or different places. We now believe that the future will inevitably be different from our own times, and we are aware of its potency and potentiality, and of our influences over it. We all carry, individually and collectively, an image or vision of the future. In stable, healthy and hopeful times, our individual and collective vision of the future can show us a path forward, one we can take with confidence in the correctness of our direction. Such a vision is “the more or less explicit claim or expression of a future that is idealized
GREEN TEACHER 89 Page 3
Illustrations: Tom Goldsmith
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